“Can
you come over and meet with us sometime next week?There’s somebody we want to talk to you about.”This was a bit of an unusual call.We didn't often hear from the social worker at the local
children’s institution.

“In
a few weeks, we’d like you to meet Scott.He’ll be coming home for summer vacation from the School for
the Blind in Ontario.Scott’s
turning twenty-one, so this is his last year at the school, and
there’s really nothing for him to do here during the day.If he stays here, he’ll just end up doing crafts.

“We
know you folks have been involved in starting housing cooperatives and
other services.Do you
think we could work together?Create
a way for him to start a new life in the community?”

A
couple of weeks later, we met Scott.He’d lived in the children’s institution from the time he
was a baby.When he was
about seven years old, a visitor from a neighbouring Province who
worked at the School for the Blind met Scott, and said, “I don’t
think this kid is retarded – he’s just blind.Why don’t you let him come with us, and we’ll see how his
learning progresses.”

You’ve
got to meet Scott to understand why he ended up in the children’s
institution.He’s a
pretty unique young man, and he must have been a pretty
unusual-looking baby.For
one thing, Scott is short.One
night, he was listening to a stand-up comedienne talk about what a
hick town we lived in:“I
come out of my hotel room and across the street there’s a store
called Mr. Big and Tall.Now
who would ever shop at a store called Mr. Big and Tall?”Scott stood up, which meant that he got about four inches
shorter, put his hands on his hips, and declared, “I sure as hell
wouldn’t!”

Scott’s
arms and legs are short, even for a short guy, and somehow he arrived
with no thumbs and some other rather unusual features.He has a little bit of vision in one eye.When Scott was born in the late 60’s, the wisdom of the day
was to tell his family, “It’s not reasonable for you to try to
raise this child.We have
a place that will give him the care and protection he needs.”

I
Need You to Know That It’s Worth It!

We
met Scott and had a series of conversations with him over the next
several months.We invited him to tell us about his life, and to tell us how
he envisioned his life outside of the institution.We talked about a lot of possibilities – finding an
apartment, renting a small house – and talked about the kind of
support he would need to make a ‘go’ of it.

One
of the things we had in mind was finding a place where there might be
a bit of ‘instant community’, so we looked at some small downtown
housing cooperatives.Scott
had told us that he wanted to live downtown, where he could walk to
lots of places: “My legs are really short, and I have a hard time
getting on buses.I
don’t want to get stuck inside all the time.”

We
found a small cooperative apartment building and did some creative
‘bridge building’ with the manager and a handful of co-op members
well before Scott moved in.

Scott
figured out that he needed a roommate to help him on a day-to-day
basis: “Somebody tall enough to reach inside the cupboards.”So we recruited a good candidate from a local human service
worker training program.Scott
did all the interviewing, and a couple of us ‘rode shotgun’ on the
interviews, helping Scott recognize the places where one can get
fooled.

He
moved out of the institution in the middle of January, in 30-below
weather.On his last
night in the institution, he went to the cafeteria for supper with a
couple of staff.A few
days later, the members of the co-op held a welcoming party, and Scott
started in on his new life.

About
a month after he moved (it had warmed up to 20-below), Scott was
having dinner with Neil, the government community service coordinator
who had done a wonderful job of arranging funding and opening doors.Neil asked, “How’s it going, Scott?”

Scott
said, “Neil, I need to tell you that I’m scared all the time.I’m scared that I’ll slip down a snow bank into the street.And when I’m walking across the park that’s in front of the
co-op I’m scared that a dog might come up behind me and run me down.

“But
Neil, I need you to know that it’s worth it!”

How
About That Job in Radio?

About
a year after Scott moved out of the institution, he became a member of
our board of directors.One
evening, a new member who happened to be a corporate lawyer was
attending his first meeting.Alan walked into the lobby of the building where we had an
office on the seventeenth floor, and saw Scott standing by the
elevators.Scott was
waiting for someone who could see well enough and reach high enough to hit the 17th
floor button.Alan took
one look at this unusual young man and thought, “I’m not sure I
can handle this.I sure
hope he isn’t getting off at the samefloor that I am.”

Scott
asked Alan to hit the button for 17, and they rode about halfway up in
silence. Scott looked up at Alan, waving his small hands in
front of his eyes, and said, “Well, what do you think of me so
far?”Alan remembers that the ice-cold shell around his heart cracked.

Later,
during a break in the meeting, Alan and Scott were making small talk
and Alan asked Scott what kind of work he did.Scott said, “Well, Alan, I go to this pre-employment training
program every day – it’s kind of a workshop.I clean and repackage the headphones for one of the airlines.But it’s not really what I want to be doing. I don’t have
any thumbs, and it’s hard to do it with just fingers.And my arms are short, so I have to hold the work close to my
face, and the cleaning fluid gets in my nose.It’s not a good high.”

Alan
asked Scott what he really wanted to do.“I’ve always wanted to be in radio.I worked in the school station when I was at the School for the
Blind in Ontario, and did the same thing at Red River Community
College after I moved out of the institution.But the rehab people say that I can’t see well
enough to cue records, and that no thumbs makes it even harder, so I
have to do headphones.”

Alan
said, “You know, Scott, I have a friend who’s in the radio
business.Maybe I could
talk to him and we could see about getting you a job at his
station.”

“Alan
that would be great!”

A
month later, at the next board meeting, Scott came up to Alan during
one of the breaks and asked, “How about that job in radio?”

Alan
realized that he’d dropped the ball, and also realized that his
conversation with Scott was a commitment.[We had coffee with Scott and Alan last week, and Alan told us that
he ducked out of the meeting and called the station manager on the
spot!]So the following week, Scott and Alan met with the station
manager.The station
manager told Scott that people hadn’t cued records in his business
for years – it was all tapes, CDs and computers now.And he invited Scott to come down to the station the following
Monday.

The
crew at the radio station taught Scott to record interviews on a portable
tape recorder (one of the engineers adapted the microphone so Scott
could hang onto it without thumbs).They taught him to edit tape, and Scott’s interviews started
popping up at four o’clock on Sunday mornings – which, when you
think of it, is where
everyone starts.On Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, Scott did pre-production
work for the program Sunday Report.

Ten
years later, Scott is still working part time at the radio station,
mostly in customer relations.He’s definitely one of the gang, and has done a whole variety
of jobs there since he started.It
was a great lesson for us in finding someone with connections in
the community, as opposed to looking to the service system for all
the answers.

Evergreen
Place

About
four years after he moved to the cooperative, Scott told us that he
wanted to move closer to Osborne Village, where he’d found one of
those places ‘where everybody knows your name’.Any Friday night, you could be sure to find Scott at a small
Irish pub called The Toad
in the Hole.One
of the wonderful things about Scott is that he has a great,
rough-around-the-edges singing voice and a passion for the music of
Stan Rogers and the Irish Rovers.

Scott
gave notice at the cooperative, and moved into Evergreen Place, a
high-rise apartment with an indoor swimming pool and a weight room.Scott started swimming every afternoon, worked out a new
route to the radio station, and began making friends in the building.

By
this time, Scott had hired his third roommate – a fellow
who played semi-professional football for the local team.Scott had learned (and taught us) a great deal about finding
roommates with whom he shared interests, and getting the relationship
to move quickly beyond ‘taking care of Scott’.The football player brought other football players (and their
girlfriends) into Scott’s life, and life moved on.

The
fourth roommate turned out to be pretty cranky. Scott’s words were,
“He wasn’t there for me.”He and Scott got along alright, but he had a pretty strong
pattern of keeping other people away.That lasted a bit less than a year, and Scott decided that he
wanted to try living ‘on his own’ – without a roommate.

He
waited until it was time to renew his lease, and negotiated for a
one-bedroom apartment in the same building.Everything else stayed in place – the Toad in the Hole,
swimming every morning, the job at the radio station.Scott traded the support contract with a roommate for some
occasional heavy cleaning, made arrangements for some of his meals
withHome Care and Meals on Wheels, and got on with the next
phase of his life.

We’ve
thought many times about the difficulty that a traditional
‘residential service’ would have had in keeping up with the
changes that Scott wanted to create in his life – three apartments,
four sets of roommates, finally working out a way to live alone but
not in isolation.Separating
the provision of services from housing was one key.Listening was another.And working harder on bridge-building than on ‘life skills’
was a third – it gave us all confidence.

Rise
Again

It
hasn’t always been easy.Scott
had some hard work to do with his family, in terms of getting them to
accept his independent lifestyle and also in coming to terms with the
question that had been haunting him ever since he was a child: “Why
didn’t you take me home when I was a baby?"

One
of Scott’s ‘standards’ at the King’s Head, where he now sings with a
band called The Tarry Trousers, is a song by Stan Rogers’ called The
Mary Ellen Carter.He
brings the place to its feet at least once every Friday evening when he
raises his arms and sings:

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